My parents didn’t get to see much of the world.
When my father retired, my siblings and I chipped in to buy our parents plane tickets for the United Kingdom. Dad had always wanted to see where his ancestors came from — England’s West Country — so they went on chartered bus expeditions and made lasting memories.
Bright spots in their travels included Loch Ness, the Isle of Skye and Wordsworth’s Lake District. Dad loved poetry and would recite verse spontaneously.
Pam Frampton / FREE PRESS Christ reaches for a fish in a century-old plaster depiction of the Last Supper in the Castello Normanno-Svevo in Bari, Italy.
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd
A host, of golden daffodils…
My husband and I just spent two months in southern Italy, where mom and dad always felt close at hand.
We lost dad nearly 10 years ago, but mom is still with us, even on the days she doesn’t know who we are.
My first taste of stinco di maiale al forno con patate — which sounds amusing to English ears but is quite seriously delicious — immediately took me back to my mother’s kitchen and her pork roast.
The Italian dish is a baked pork shin accompanied by potatoes caramelized by juices flowing from the rosemary-flavoured meat, and mom’s was a piece of pork shoulder tenderized through slow cooking and spiced up with a little help from Lipton’s onion soup mix, but the results were similar: savoury meat, falling off the bone — no knives necessary.
Dad — a small but wiry man with a lumberjack’s appetite — would have loved the Flintstones-sized shank I had.
Mom would appreciate the way food is beautifully presented in Italy, from pyramids of perfectly ripe fruit and vegetables to the mirror-glaze cakes and tiny fruit tarts glistening with sugar like jewels in their glass display cases.
Dad had an affinity for animals. Dogs loved him (and the bits of bologna he generously supplied). Wild birds — blue jays, juncos, whiskey jacks — flocked to him and would eat from his hand.
I think he would like the avian theme we chose for his headstone, and the small stone bird we placed next to it.
He was often likened to St. Francis of Assisi, a patron saint of Italy renowned for his love of animals and nature. St. Francis believed that all creatures are brothers and sisters under God, and my father shared that sentiment. He often said of our late dog, Willie, that he was as good a Christian as any person he had known.
So, I thought of dad as we wandered through Castello Normanno-Svevo in Bari, built in the 12th century. Because, as the story goes, St. Francis once stayed at the castle as a guest of Roman Emperor Frederick II, who was clearly a bit of a cynic. According to several sources, Frederick had a courtesan sent to the saint’s room to test his faith, and watched through a peephole. St. Francis turned the woman away, impressing the emperor with his principles. (If St. Francis bore any similarity to my father, Frederick might have found more success had he tempted the saint with a delicious pork shank.)
Dad would also have loved a century-old plaster depiction of the Last Supper we saw inside the castle, showing Christ reaching for a fish.
A former teacher who eventually followed his true calling and became an Anglican priest, dad was well aware of the significance of the fish as a religious symbol representing Christ. He loved the story of the loaves and fishes, how Jesus turned five small loaves of bread and two fish into enough food to feed 5,000 people (a feat similar to the one my mother pulled off in our full-to-capacity house every day of my childhood).
My father enjoyed fish as a source of physical as well as spiritual nourishment.
When I was a child, he often sent me to the waterfront with a five dollar bill when we saw the fishing boats coming in across the bay, to see if I could buy some fresh cod. I’d watch the men prong the still-flapping fish onto the wharf, the fishes’ tender protruding bellies like white satin, and shyly ask if I could buy one for my dad. Their response was always the same: they’d hand over a nice-sized cod and wave away the crumpled bill. “Bring this home to your father and tell him his money’s no good here.”
I think of my parents, often.
They may not be with me in person, but I carry them with me always.
Like Wordsworth’s daffodils, they remain “continuous as the stars that shine / and twinkle on the milky way.”
Pam Frampton is a freelance writer and editor who lives in St. John’s.
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